Music News

For consumers, "free" is rarely ever free — especially when it comes to social media and other online platforms. In exchange for utilizing services like Facebook, for example, users allow information about themselves — everything from their ages and zip codes to the particular products, services and companies they like — to be collected, sliced, diced, and sometimes given to other advertisers, who pay for access to that information. It's called "targeted advertising," and professional...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxQz2P6X9Fg Anyone placing bets on whether Miranda Lambert's post-divorce album would be a fireball of bitterness, or just Blake Shelton's, uh, belongings in a glass jar (download code included), might be surprised by the sense of resignation that permeates "Vice," Lambert's new single. Country music's reigning queen and her endlessly savvy co-writers Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne know these lyrics will get pored over for autobiographical details, so the song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwO3QD0zja8 When Wilco surprise-dropped last year's Star Wars album, the band said it already had another full-length ready to go. Today they've confirmed that album is called Schmilco (possibly a reference to Harry Nilsson's 1971 release Nilsson Schmilsson ) and is due out Sept. 9 on the group's own dBpm Records. Wilco is also sharing a new song from Schmilco called "If I Ever Was A Child." In announcing Schmilco the band said the new album is mostly acoustic...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11KOFvXtg2g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8qXUdMciBE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15XuMThGgy4 One of the founding fathers of punk, singer and visual artist Alan Vega, died Saturday. He was 78. Vega's death was announced in a family statement published by his longtime friend, musician Henry Rollins. The cause and place of death were not shared, though Vega reportedly had suffered a stroke and a heart attack in 2012 . As a musician, Vega was best known as half...

"...the Spirituals, in a limited degree, are still in the making." -James Weldon Johnson On Aug. 24, 1937, Lizzie Williams gave her testimony. Part of the Works Progress Administration's Slave Narrative Collection, Ms. Williams' remembrances documented that most inhumane institution through descriptions of everyday situations, from her regular change of hands as property to the children she was made to "mind" in her capacity as maid. Her narrative is punctuated by the "paddyrollers,"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhyORjJ00Rk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APFSsFBw6a0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo05mizV6Dg The fallout from the Brexit vote has attracted all kinds of commentary from many corners of the world. But some particularly musically minded observers have been intrigued by the enigmatic coda to parting comments made by Britain's outgoing prime minister. On Monday, David Cameron addressed the media about the person who was poised to succeed him, Theresa May....

Headliners at the Essence Festival, which marked its 22 nd Fourth of July weekend in New Orleans earlier this month, play in the middle of the Superdome, a cavernous arena that, as configured for the fest, seats about 50,000. Up on the stadium's plaza level, a cozier, less formal kind of show takes place. Four multipurpose party rooms deemed Superlounges, which each fit about 1,200 fans, serve as secondary stages. It's where you'll see something chill, like Robert Glasper's weird and hazy...

When musicians Nick Walusko and Darian Sahanaja first met in Los Angeles back in 1983, they immediately bonded over their shared passions: movies, sci-fi and the mysteries of 1960s pop. The two spent countless hours poring over records by bands like Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas & the Papas and The Beach Boys , "just taking apart music and figuring out how all the parts work together," Walusko recalls. "Dissect" sounds like — very clinical of a word," Sahanaja adds. "But it's just more about...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJLIiF15wjQ In 1962, Goonhilly Earth Station's biggest satellite dish, Arthur , received the first live trans-Atlantic television broadcast from America. Over the coming decades, it would bring Muhammad Ali's fights, the Apollo 11 moon landing and the U.S. leg of Live Aid to British TV screens. In the year 2000, as an 11-year-old on a school trip, I approached this monument to telecommunication in a state of anxious anticipation over less momentous news. We had...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmb80HXWsFQ Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez once said that One Hundred Years of Solitude was a 400-page Vallenato: a traditional music of Colombia's Caribbean coast. The songs are mini-epics, filled with local characters and poetry. It's a style that stretches back 200 years and is still thriving today. At high noon in Valledupar, the capital of Vallenato, a traditional trio takes the stage. The occasion is the Vallenato Festival, which has been held in...

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. DAVID GREENE, HOST: The Green Mill Cocktail Lounge is really a Chicago classic. There's a neon sign, brick front. It used to be a speak-easy. Al Capone even hung out there. These days, it is a jazz club. And most Friday nights, a guy named Chris Foreman makes his way behind the bar - not to pour drinks - to play the Hammond B3. It's one of those big, funky organs you hear in old R&B, gospel or jazz. (SOUNDBITE OF ORGAN) GREENE: Love...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLPsk89aUKw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEamE0MYPkg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy9W_mrY_Vk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXtzcViZPGA Freetown Sound captures Devonté Hynes at a crucial moment in the building not just of a distinguished career, but also of an artistic persona that bares the complications of an uncommon star. He's London-born and lives in New York. Chocolate complexioned, braided and lanky, he's physically the kind of guy perceived as a...

Before the folk rock band The Lumineers released their newest album, Cleopatra , in April, they played a series of secret shows. Emphasis here on "secret." "There was a large concern about the album being sort-of released via grainy video and leaked out online," said Wesley Schultz, the band's lead singer. So the band decided to lock up people's phones — not take them away, exactly, but just lock them up for the show. Like a timeout. At the concerts, The Lumineers started working with a...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ09_E7dy5I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcw4fXiJDTM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UprcpdwuwCg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsC0x-LSLNo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QzedN5SuNU Every year around this time, the music world engages in a public battle to determine the Song Of The Summer. What's the one song that'll blare out of car radios, at barbecues and in sweaty clubs all season — that upbeat, inescapably catchy anthem that'll crop up in movie...

NPR listeners first met fiddle player Sara Watkins in Nickel Creek — the trio of prodigies that brought a youthful spirit to a bluegrass world that reveres its elders. Once she started making solo albums, however, she figured out what maturity sounds like for her. Gary Paczosa engineered the pair of Nickel Creek albums that put the band on the map, both of which were produced by Alison Krauss. Paczosa remembers Krauss remarking on Watkins's place in the Nickel Creek dynamic, which matched her...

Sick of getting your view blocked at live shows by people holding up their phones? Apple was granted a patent yesterday for technology that can disable those cameras — at least in specific places. The system mapped out in this patent would use infrared emitters to temporarily deactivate the photo and video capabilities on devices like mobile phones, laptops, stand-alone video or still cameras or any other "electronic device with an image sensor." Venues, or those in charge of a given space,...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLObvzc6dA8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD1k4_d0S1Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u67Nf2VRXFw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ddsFwESME One of Pakistan's best-known singers, Amjad Sabri, was gunned down Wednesday in the city of Karachi, in what police are calling a targeted killing. The attack occurred when the 45-year-old Sabri was on his way to a television station, where he was scheduled to give a performance to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The...

The band Winger is perhaps best remembered for its late 1980s rock anthems, like "Seventeen." Its musicians could play. They wrote catchy songs, and of course, they had the hair. MTV viewers ate it up. "Me being the Peter Pan of rock that I was, doing double pirouettes with my bass and you know, a real ham in the camera, it took off," says Kip Winger, the group's lead singer and bassist, who formed the band after touring with Alice Cooper in the late '80s. But with popularity came derision:...

Imagine being able to text your favorite music artists at their personal phone number. You might be able to tell them how much you loved their latest single. You might be able to tell them about yourself and later receive a happy birthday wish from them. This is exactly what Grammy-nominated rapper and singer Ryan Leslie is doing with his company, SuperPhone . The app lets him manage conversations with 54,000 of his friends, family, fans and colleagues from his personal phone. Anyone can fill...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkLYlrE2lPs Keyboardist and composer Bernie Worrell, who helped shape the sound of the band Parliament-Funkadelic and influenced countless artists across a wide range of genres, died Friday at 72. Worrell announced earlier this year that he had been diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. His musical life began early — according to his official biography, he started studying piano at age 3, wrote his first concerto at age 8 and performed with the National...

Musician and composer Frank Zappa was a lot of things: biting satirist, ferocious critic of societal norms, outspoken defender of free speech. He saw himself as not only an entertainer, but also a serious composer. And he saw no contradiction in being all of these things at once, to the consternation and confusion of the many journalists who interviewed him. A number of those interviews have been compiled in German documentarian Thorsten Schutte's new film Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in...

Before he turned twenty-five, Van Morrison had written a rock and roll standard ("Gloria"), essayed arguably the greatest-ever Bob Dylan cover ("It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" — both with Them), made a top-ten American hit ("Brown Eyed Girl") and recorded two very different, very compatible LP masterpieces, Astral Weeks and Moondance — the former concerned with "childhood, initiation, sex, and death," per Greil Marcus in Stranded , the latter with rebirth, experience, love and living for its...